My New Electric Guitar
Since I don't have a real studio [someday, someday] I record everything inside my computer. Thus, I rely on sampled instruments of all kinds. Mostly, I have orchestral instruments, but I've begun collecting others recently from vr_sound such as world percussion instruments [currently in love with the djembe] and most recently, a "med_dist_elec_guitar". I had a pleasant surprise with these last night.
I'm working on a little music for an indie game called Illumina. They wanted Halo-like music for their Halo-like game and so I stole the idea of using an old style of music (Halo uses plainsong or chant) and blending other stuff with it, like a wailing guitar and a rock beat. The first part was easy: I've written plenty of choral Classical music and so I dashed off some 18th-century style church music and sent it to the game maker. He liked it but wanted something more aggressive, too. I knew the day was coming that I would need to write something that sounded like rock music so I finally went to work to blend the 18th century with the late 20th. I thought my Roland 1080 (a nice machine with plenty of the basics) would have what I needed, assuming it was built more for pop music than anything else, but I was wrong. The guitars were almost all synthesized rather than sampled and I couldn't get an expressive lick out of them. So, I went to vr sound and found a few guitars, bought one and proceeded to other projects while I waited for the disk to arrive. When it did, I loaded it and started to fool around, wondering if I could actually write something that could pass for rock. The guitar really sounded great, which helped of course, but when I started playing some soulful licks against the melancholy 18th cent. church chorus, the strange and beautiful expressivity of electric guitar started spinning out of the speakers [it sounds a little like Albinoni planted in the 1980s]. I added a beat[looped, very simple and unfinished] and cranked up the guitar an octave toward the end and the whole thing turned convincingly from sadness to aggression. It fits the premise of the game and I'm hoping the game producer likes it and agrees. I'm such an unagressive person-- what do I know?
I'm a little afraid of playing the track this morning. What if it stinks?
I'm working on a little music for an indie game called Illumina. They wanted Halo-like music for their Halo-like game and so I stole the idea of using an old style of music (Halo uses plainsong or chant) and blending other stuff with it, like a wailing guitar and a rock beat. The first part was easy: I've written plenty of choral Classical music and so I dashed off some 18th-century style church music and sent it to the game maker. He liked it but wanted something more aggressive, too. I knew the day was coming that I would need to write something that sounded like rock music so I finally went to work to blend the 18th century with the late 20th. I thought my Roland 1080 (a nice machine with plenty of the basics) would have what I needed, assuming it was built more for pop music than anything else, but I was wrong. The guitars were almost all synthesized rather than sampled and I couldn't get an expressive lick out of them. So, I went to vr sound and found a few guitars, bought one and proceeded to other projects while I waited for the disk to arrive. When it did, I loaded it and started to fool around, wondering if I could actually write something that could pass for rock. The guitar really sounded great, which helped of course, but when I started playing some soulful licks against the melancholy 18th cent. church chorus, the strange and beautiful expressivity of electric guitar started spinning out of the speakers [it sounds a little like Albinoni planted in the 1980s]. I added a beat[looped, very simple and unfinished] and cranked up the guitar an octave toward the end and the whole thing turned convincingly from sadness to aggression. It fits the premise of the game and I'm hoping the game producer likes it and agrees. I'm such an unagressive person-- what do I know?
I'm a little afraid of playing the track this morning. What if it stinks?
posted by Nick Palmer at 7:44 AM
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